Bob Thurman: Wisdom, Bliss, and Openness - Five Things I've Learned

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about achieving reliable and lasting happiness during my lifetime learning and teaching the Buddha’s curriculum.

I have spent my life learning and teaching the Buddha’s curriculum, a path designed to enable any serious student of whatever faith or doubt to achieve reliable and lasting happiness. During my sixty+ year journey, I have done university teaching about Tibetan Buddhism, translated Buddhist texts, and written books that share with others all I’ve discovered about Tibetan Buddhist culture and its healing arts and sciences of body, mind, and spirit.

During this time, my personal life has been marked by initially being afraid of what I thought was a dangerous and difficult reality to feeling reasonably comfortable and occasionally blissful in what now seems to me to be a reality of sheer goodness. The five key axes of this unfolding have been:

That the precious opportunity of having gained the precious human life results from an inconceivably difficult evolution

That facing death is the key to making the most of such a life.

That the ethical way of body, mind, and speech is the art of skillful navigating through the ocean of evolution—goodness is practical and powerful; badness is self-destructive and weak.

That love and compassion are the secret art of every level of happiness.

That full wisdom is not only possible for a human being, but indispensably necessary for realizing the bliss of reality and the full measure of love and life.

It is these teachings that I wish to share with you in my upcoming class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Wisdom, Bliss, and Openness. One by one, I will explain. We will meditate. We will discuss.

In our time together, I hope to share many of the ideas offered in my most recent book, Wisdom is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts that Can Change Your Life. I will also focus on a paradoxical expression inherited from Shakyamuni Buddha and the great Nāgārjuna – an expression that has been key to enlightenment education for at least the last few thousand years in numerous cultures and contexts: shūnyatā-karunā-garbham – in Sanskrit, “Openness the womb of compassion”-in English.

The great thing about what I’ve learned: The Buddha’s path of education is for anyone. You need not be Buddhist, you need not be religious, you need not even be “spiritual” – in fact, skeptics are most welcome. You do need to be a bit open-minded about the question of what is real and what is unreal. You need to be willing to learn, to think critically and confidently, to get rid of the idea that you can’t understand important things, and to question everything. Ultimately, to put yourself on a path of wisdom and bliss you will need to experiment by cultivating both your own good sense and your own inner intuitive experience.

One other thing I’ve learned during this time: To follow His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s sincere policy and prime directive not to missionize or convert anyone from or to any religion or belief system. Whether these ideas and practices are familiar to you or you’re coming to them for the very first time, is in this spirit that I invite you to join me.

I believe that you will be presently surprised by how real and applicable these teachings can be, and I look forward to sharing them with you.

Here we go!

Robert A.F. “Tenzin” Thurman

About Bob Thurman

Robert A.F. Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, President of the Tibet House U.S., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies.

Time chose Professor Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, and The New York Times hailed Thurman to be “considered the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.”

Thurman is known as a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings. He is a riveting speaker and an author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, including The Central Philosophy of Tibet, Circling the Sacred Mountain, Essential Tibetan Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet, Worlds of Transformation, Inner Revolution, Infinite Life, the Jewel Tree of Tibet, Why The Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World, and with Sharon Salzberg, Love Your Enemies.

His own search for enlightenment began while he was a student at Harvard. After an accident in which he lost the use of an eye, Thurman left school on a spiritual quest throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He found his way to India, where he first saw H.H. the Dalai Lama in 1962. After learning Tibetan and studying Buddhism he decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk and was the first Westerner to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. However, some years later, he offered up his robes when “he discovered he could be more effective in the American equivalent of the monastery: the university”. He returned to Harvard to finish his PhD.

Inspired by his good friend the Dalai Lama, Thurman stands on Buddhism’s open reality, and thence takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world, whether the sweep of history, the subtleties of the inner science of the psyche, or the wonders of the life of the heart. He always shares the sense of refuge in the Dharma, which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion, sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present, and opens a door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful future.

Frequently Asked Questions

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If you’d like a refund, we can happily credit the card you used to register for the session. Please send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com , and we’ll confirm receipt as soon as we see it (We don’t need your credit card info – just your email address and date of purchase.)

There are two things to know:

Unfortunately, we can only accept cancellations and refunds up to 48 hours before a scheduled session.
There is sure to be a lapse in time between the time we refund your order and the time a corresponding credit appears on your credit card statement. So that you’re not left waiting and wondering, we’ll contact you as soon as we’ve processed the credit in our system.

For reasons we hope you’ll understand – the biggest of them the fact that we make a point of compensating the folks who host Five Things I’ve Learned classes as quickly as we can – we can’t accommodate refunds for tickets purchased within 48 of the start of a scheduled live event. We can also accommodate refund requests for the purchase of an archived session only within 24 hours from the time of purchase.

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If you’ve purchased a ticket for this online class and you find that for some reason you can’t make the live session, you have two choices:

The first: View the session archive. You can view the session archive as soon as it’s posted – or any time, as often as you like. We’ll make an archive of this class available within 48 hours of the live session, and we’ll send every ticket holder details on how they can view it. As a ticket holder, you’re able to view this full session archive any time– as often as you like.
The second: Request a refund. Just send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com, and we’ll help sort things out. Please keep in mind that we can only accommodate refund requests made more than 48 hours from the start of a live session.

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The receipt you receive via email immediately after you register is all you need to confirm you’re set for the upcoming session.

About 48 hours before the live class is scheduled to begin, we’ll send you a personalized email confirming that everything’s on schedule and containing easy instructions for accessing the class.

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If you’ve not received confirmation of your purchase, it’s not because we haven’t sent it. In fact, we send an immediately confirmation to the email address you share with us to ensure that we can reach you with class details.

If you don’t receive a confirmation within 10 minutes or so making your purchase, please first check your “junk” or “promotions” email first — some people’s email programs group unfamiliar emails in these types of folders. The email date and time should match closely the time you purchased your ticket online.

If the confirmation email is not there, there’s a small possibility that your email address wasn’t entered as you intended when you registered. (You’d be surprised, but this happens.)

In any case, we want to make sure we can reach you. And we want to make sure you’re registered for the class you want. if you can’t find your confirmation email, please send us a note at pre.event@extendedsession.com. We’ll get back to you right away.

How long do I have access to this class?

Your ticket entitles you to ongoing access to this class — even after the live session concludes.

If you purchase a ticket in time to join the class live, you can view the archive as soon as it’s posted, as often as you like. Look for an email with information about how to access the course archive within 48 hours of the end of the live class. Once you get it, you’ll have all the information you need to access it as you like across any and all devices you own.

If you purchase a ticket after the live class takes place, you can view the archive immediately, and you can return to it as frequently as you like

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Bob Thurman

Wisdom, Bliss, and Openness

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View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about achieving reliable and lasting happiness during my lifetime learning and teaching the Buddha’s curriculum.

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